by K. J. Parker
'Right,' Colsceg said. 'When are you thinking of leaving?'
'Straight away,' Poldarn said, as much to his own surprise as anybody else's. 'No point in wasting precious time, and the sooner we leave, the sooner we'll get back.' As he said that, it occurred to him that Elja was down at Ciartanstead, and he'd just convincingly argued against sparing the time to go there and say goodbye. That seemed to strike him as a very bad and unlucky thing to do, but it was too late to go back on his decision.
He'd kept his reconnaissance party down to a round half-dozen, himself included: Egil and Raffen and Boarci (Poldarn was counting on him as a sort of lucky mascot), Rook and Barn. He had an uneasy feeling that he'd chosen most of them simply because he had no trouble telling them apart and remembering their names. But, he rationalised, Egil was smart, Boarci seemed to have a knack of not getting killed and of rescuing people when they'd got themselves into trouble; Rook had contrived to keep himself alive through the disaster at Lyatsbridge, so clearly he was nobody's fool, and the other two were stolid and fairly unflappable. He missed Eyvind very badly, of course, if only because Eyvind generally seemed able to understand what he was saying. They took with them as much food and water as they could carry, and the thickest leather boots, coats and hats they could find, in case it started raining big chunks of burning mountain on their heads before they could get out of the way. Apart from that, nothing obvious in the form of sensible precautions seemed to spring to mind. Boarci took his axe too, of course, but presumably from sheer force of habit, unless he was hoping they'd run into one or more slow-moving bears.
The first day they walked in silence, keeping up a pace that was just too fast for comfort, rarely taking their eyes off the mountain and the black smudge over it. They'd opted to head for the mountain in as close an approximation to a straight line as they could manage; this meant trudging up rather more hills than Poldarn would have chosen if the decision had been up to him rather than a wordless consensus. (It did occur to him that he'd wrongly presumed their intention, and they were just following him; but that was probably only because he was feeling depressed.) They carried on walking until it was too dark to see where they were going, then lay down where they stopped and went to sleep. The rising sun woke them all up, and they carried on along the line where they'd left off without stopping for anything to eat, an act of forbearance made somewhat easier by the knowledge that all they had in the way of supplies was the inevitable porridge and leeks.
As the mountain gradually grew larger in front of them, Poldarn found himself thinking back to his memory of visiting the hot springs with his grandfather and realised that something was very different about the silhouette he was walking towards. It didn't take him long to figure out what it was. Instead of a gently tapering, mostly symmetrical peak there was a swollen chimney, perched on the mountain top like a comical hat. They were treading on cinders by now, which made their progress slow and depressingly tiring, and the air stank of sulphur. Even at midday it was as dark as an hour after sunset; the black cloud was between them and the sun, and every fifth step or so they'd stumble over a larger than usual slab of brittle black rock.
Disconcertingly, the smoke wasn't coming out of the chimney; if anything, it appeared to be venting from somewhere on the other side of the mountain, hidden from view. Poldarn wasn't sure that he wanted to get close enough to see it, anyway, but he didn't really have any choice in the matter. It'd be too humiliating to turn back at this stage because of something so trivial as the fear of death. From time to time they heard ominous cracking and splitting noises, and the occasional deep rumble. More than once, the ground shook under their feet, an effect that Poldarn found horribly frightening.
'The way I see it,' Boarci said after a very long silence, 'it's a bit like a really big fat boil on your bum. It gets bigger and bigger and redder and redder, till finally it's so full of pus and crap that it bursts all over the place.'
The sun behind the cloud of black smoke went down just as they arrived at the hot springs. In spite of the darkness, Poldarn recognised the place at once. Not much had changed, except that the snow had gone and there was a narrow crack in the ground, no more than a foot wide but bewilderingly deep-Egil dropped in a pebble but nobody heard it land-running away up the hill as far as they could see.
'I don't like that at all,' Egil said. 'Seems to me that if it starts playing up while we're here, this is an obvious place for it to come up through.'
True enough, there were patches of grey mist and smoke hanging in the air above the crack, like little tangles of sheep's wool caught in a thorn bush. But they weren't confined to the crack, or even the area of the hot springs. The air was full of them; it was as if they were strolling through an orchard and the smoke was blossom on invisible trees.
'What are we supposed to be looking for, anyway?' Barn said nervously as he stepped over the crack.
'I don't know,' Poldarn answered promptly. 'Won't know till I see it, either.'
'Oh.' Barn nodded, as if that made perfect sense now that someone had taken the time to explain it to him clearly. 'So how much further have we got to go? My feet hurt.'
Poldarn looked round. 'We might as well stop here for the night,' he said. 'At least I've got some sort of idea where we are, in relation to everything.'
'Oh, sure,' put in Raffen. 'Let's camp out here, right on a crack. I mean, what's so special about waking up again?'
Poldarn ignored that and sank to his knees, struggling to get his arms free of the straps of his pack. 'The way I see it,' he went on, 'either we can keep going up till we get to the edge of the chimney, and then we can look down inside and see what's going on down there, or we can go round the side until we find out where all that smoke's coming from. Anybody got any preferences?'
Nobody seemed very taken with either option, but they seemed to prefer the former. 'I suppose it'll be all right,' Barn said, 'since the smoke's not actually coming out from there.' He wiped sweat off his face with his sleeve; it was decidedly hot, though they'd all felt chilly an hour or so ago.
'You all get your heads down,' Poldarn said cheerfully. 'I'm not particularly tired; I'll be quite happy just lying here, so if anything starts to happen I can give you all a shout in plenty of time.'
Immediately, Boarci twisted over onto his back, pulled his hat down over his face and appeared to go to sleep. The others took a bit longer-Egil even ventured to wash his face and hands by stepping into a shallow pool of hot water, but he yelped with pain and hopped out again straight away, announcing that the water was no longer pleasantly warm but boiling hot.
Although he was very tired, Poldarn had no difficulty at all staying awake; the thought of falling asleep in that place and dreaming was disturbing enough to keep his eyes wide open. In the dark he could make out a faint red glow behind the mountain that hadn't been visible in daylight, which worried him and made him feel grateful that they'd decided to go up instead of round the mountain top. A few hours before dawn, he became aware that a very fine shower of dust had started to fall; his eyes were gritty and he could feel it on his skin. He suddenly realised that he was hungry, dug a long-hoarded slab of hard cheese out of his pack and ate it slowly and deliberately.
The sunrise, when it came, was spectacular, a blaze of orange and red smeared across the sky in wild patterns and swirls. For a long time, all he could do was lie on his back and look up at it. Eventually, Boarci woke up.
'Bloody hell,' he yawned, 'is it morning already? How long have you been awake?'
'I didn't sleep,' Poldarn replied.
'More fool you, then. You'll be knackered this time tomorrow.'
They ate breakfast in a dull red glow, and set off immediately afterwards. As the day wore on the daylight started to fade, but the glare behind the mountain grew fiercer, so at least they could see where they were putting their feet. Rook was sure there was a lot more smoke coming out than there had been the day before-maybe twice as much, even. 'That's just because we're close
r to it,' Poldarn replied, though he didn't believe what he was saying. Still, it seemed to cheer the others up, for some reason. The dust in the air grew steadily thicker, and they saw several more fissures like the one they'd noticed at the hot springs. Steam and yellow smoke rose up steeply from each one, making it hard to see where the cracks were, but they managed to cross them without anybody falling in.
As always seemed to be the way when struggling up a mountain, the peak proved to be much further away than they'd anticipated, and it was well past noon when they found themselves at the foot of the new chimney. Its walls were steep and black, in places hard and smooth as glass, extremely difficult and treacherous to climb, but now that they were this close, nobody seemed to want to hold back; it was as if the mere act of getting to the top was going to solve something, possibly even make the mountain stop misbehaving and go back to sleep. None of them said anything, or appeared to have anything to say. From time to time, Poldarn had the feeling that he was seeing something familiar, but he couldn't begin to think what it might be. More likely to be his imagination, he decided. One good thing: he wasn't feeling particularly tired, in spite of his lack of sleep. That too was something he couldn't readily explain.
So slow was their progress that when sunset came they were still dragging themselves uphill. But that was irrelevant; the benefit they got from the sun was minor enough anyway under the shadow of the cloud, whereas the red light from the other side of the mountain was getting stronger all the time, plenty good enough to see their way by. Besides, none of them liked the idea of trying to camp out on the steep ramparts of the chimney, for a number of quite obvious reasons. They kept going, somehow or other-it wasn't so much that they felt tired as that they'd been exhausted for so long that they seemed to have forgotten what it was like to feel any other way.
They hardly noticed the moment of arrival; one minute they were clambering up a particularly steep section of black rock, the next they were on a ledge, with no more mountain above them, only black cloud saturated with raw red light. The ledge was over a hundred yards across and perfectly level. They lay down, so thankful not to be climbing any more that they didn't have room for any other emotion, and stayed there without moving for a long time.
'Well,' Poldarn said eventually, 'we're here. We might as well go and have a look.'
Nobody seemed inclined to move, so Poldarn went on alone. When he reached the edge, he lay down on his stomach and crawled the last yard or so; then he stuck his head out over the ledge and looked down.
The first thing that struck him, quite literally, was the heat. He knew the feeling very well; it was like standing over the forge while waiting for a piece of iron to come up to welding heat. The blast of rising hot air scrubbed his face and burned his cheeks, and instinctively he closed his eyes and pulled his head back out of the way. That wouldn't do at all, he decided, so he braced himself and tried again, making a conscious effort to keep his eyes open.
The inside walls of the chimney fell away sharply into a dazzling lake of pure white light. Once again, he thought welding heat, because it was the same colour and quality of light as iron glows with in that crucial moment of malleability before it melts and breaks up, the point at which it can be fused into another piece of iron with nothing more than a few light taps of the hammer. That explained the ferocious heat, even though it lay several hundred yards below him. At first he couldn't make out what it was; not iron or steel, he rationalised, in spite of the resemblance. Then, from somewhere in the back of his mind, came a recollection of watching glass-makers at work, and Poldarn realised that the huge pool of white liquid was molten rock.
The heat had become unbearable, and he pulled back, unable to see for the staring white blurs across his eyes, and the tears. All he could think about, for some reason, was the similarity between the chimney and the pool and a crucible of molten metal, the same shape and colour and glowing light. It must be an extraordinary thing, he thought, to melt rock in a furnace; who would do such a thing, and why? Given the sheer size of the undertaking, it would have to be a god of some sort, a huge and enormously thick-skinned god who could handle such a crucible and withstand such a heat. But even a god would need to have a reason for going to so much trouble, and that raised the question of what he was planning to make out of it. If there was a crucible and a pool of melt, somewhere there had to be a mould, pressed into the sand with a pattern. The only logical explanation was that this god was melting down the old world to make a new one, turning waste and scrap into useful material, loosening it from the bonds of memory, restoring to it its true and original nature by means of the intercession of fire, which forgives and redeems all past sins.
Poldarn opened his eyes again. Yes, he thought, that's all very well, but we didn't tramp all the way up here just to bask in the poetic symmetry of it all. Very reluctantly, he crawled back and examined the view a third time.
When he'd suggested the expedition, back at Haldersness, he'd had some idea of coming up with some scheme for dealing with the problem, stopping the volcano or making it harmless. Now that he'd had a chance to look at the thing, it was obvious that anything like that was out of the question, it was simply too big and too fierce; it'd be doomed to failure, like arm-wrestling with a god. They couldn't put the fire out with buckets of water, or fill in the chimney with earth and bury it, or even tap it like a beer barrel and draw the molten rock off through a spigot in some harmless direction. The problem was insoluble, he couldn't think of a way of dealing with it because there wasn't one.
'Well?' someone said behind him. Poldarn stayed where he was. 'Take a look for yourself,' he replied. They got down on their hands and knees next to him and crept forward. 'Watch it,' he added, 'it's a bit warm once you get your head out over the edge.'
They did as they were told, and after they'd gazed at it for as long as they could bear they dragged themselves back, just as he'd done, and sat still and quiet for a while.
'Might as well have stayed home,' Raffen said eventually. 'I can't see there's anything we can do about that.'
'No,' Poldarn replied, 'there isn't, unless we get on a ship and go back to the Empire. But that's assuming it's any better there. For all I know, every mountain north of Torcea's gone like this one has, and in a few weeks' time the whole Empire'll be gone, the world will have melted away and we'll all be dead. No way of knowing, really.'
They weren't particularly impressed with that statement-understandably, given the effort it had cost them to get there. 'We can't just go back and tell them they're all going to be killed but not to worry about it,' Rook grumbled. 'They'd think we've all gone crazy or something. Come on, you said all we have to do is figure out how it works and we can stop it.'
Poldarn pulled himself together, sighing. 'All right,' he said. 'Seems to me there's got to be an enormously hot fire right down there in the roots of the mountain, big and hot enough to melt rock, like a lime kiln. Once it's done that, I guess all the smoke and fumes get bottled up deep inside until eventually they burst out and punch a hole right through the top of the mountain. The cinders and ash that got all over everything must be molten rock that ended up being spat out high into the air, where it cooled off and came down everywhere like snow. Anyway,' he added, 'that's the way I see it. Anybody got a better explanation?'
'Sounds reasonable enough to me,' said Barn, wiping grit out of his eyes with his knuckles. 'So how does that help us?'
'It doesn't.' Poldarn shook his head. His cheeks and forehead were stinging horribly. 'I was wrong. There isn't a thing we can do about it. Let's go home, I'm sick to death of this place.'
Barn frowned. 'What about when it rains?' he asked. 'Surely if it rains hard enough, that ought to put it out.'
Poldarn couldn't be bothered to reply, so it was up to Boarci to explain. 'It's too hot,' he said. 'The rain wouldn't get anywhere near the bottom of the chimney before it turned to steam. You remember all those fluffy white clouds the last time, once the rain started?'
Barn nodded. 'That's right,' he said. 'Not that it matters, we can't make it rain anyhow. But so what? As long as it stays down there it won't be doing us any harm.'
Poldarn looked up. 'Depends,' he said. 'What we don't know is how big the fire is or what's causing it. My guess is that it's the same fire as heats the water for the hot springs-in which case it's been going for thirty-odd years to my certain knowledge, and quite possibly a few thousand years before that.'
'Fine,' Barn replied. 'Like you said, it's been going on for centuries and never done anybody any harm till now' He paused, then went on, 'I'm sure you're right about fumes getting trapped under the mountain and finally blowing out-I guess that must be what happened, and that's where all the ash and stuff came from. But now there's this huge great vent, like runners and risers when you're casting, so won't the fumes just rise up out of there and get blown away into the air, all nice and harmless?' He shrugged. 'All right, so it's very big and impressive, but I don't see what harm it's going to do us. I'm guessing that this new breakout is where another pocket of the fumes and steam and stuff must've built up, and it blasted a hole into the side of the mountain so it could get out. I don't know, maybe there's a whole load of them just getting ready to go pop, but doesn't it stand to reason that it must've used up most of its bottled-up fumes and shit by now? In which case, we may get a few more sprinklings of the cinders, but nothing too bad, just like this time around.' He shrugged. 'Come on, you're a blacksmith, you know what furnaces are like, and casting hot metal. If your sand's wet or you've got a blocked vent, it blows up and you get the whole lot in your face. If you've done your vents right and cooked your mould, there's nothing to it. Same here, I reckon.'
